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thanksgiving posted: Thu 2018-11-22 18:38:41 tags: n/a
Ever since my deluded cousin sputtered his mishmash of rationalizations for turning Christ's commandments (more generosity, less judgment) upside-down (in essence, "thou shalt abandon the poor lest they become dependent")... part of my mind has been occupied with calling out that hypocrisy in some inescapable way.

I should and usually do know better than to feed the troll, of course. But this train of thought reminded me of some bit of curmudgeonly wisdom I'd picked up... I don't know where, maybe Heinlein or maybe Peck's "The Road Less Traveled"? Something like "Not having everything you want is essential to human happiness". So while we're reminding ourselves of all the things we're grateful for, we can also whip up a sense of gratitude for skills and talents to leverage and develop in pursuit of life goals, I guess. A sense that there is more to come, that it's not all downhill or retreating to familiar/comfortable territory from here.

I googled but I couldn't pinpoint the provenance of this proverb. I did find a lot of results where the idea was juxtaposed thus: "happiness is not having everything you want, but wanting everything you have" - in other words, instead of focusing on what you want and don't have, focusing on what needs and wants have been fulfilled. And perhaps even if things aren't perfect or great, they could be worse and we should be thankful that they're not.

The other Thanksgiving meditation concerns the native Americans' trade and sharing of agriculture and hunting lore with the Plymouth colony's settlers, who arrived expecting a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, and instead found themselves in a difficult land with harsh winters and unfamiliar wildlife, already occupied by savages even less Christian than the worldly, impure Old World blasphemers and heretics they'd pilgrimaged to separate themselves from. There is a LOT of misinformation and fake scholarship out there about the Pilgrims - no they were not "grave robbers", they did not participate in the massacre of Pequod natives, we don't really know much documented about what festivals they did observe but it's not inconsistent for the Plymouth colony to have celebrated a feast (not a fast) in 1621 around the season of the Biblical festival of Sukkot, and it would not be inconsistent with that holy observance to "welcome the stranger" (natives).